Penny Dreadful

You wouldn’t believe how excited I was when I first heard “Penny Dreadful” was coming out. It had everything I loved: Old timey characters from my favorite classic horror tales such as the Werewolf, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, Dorian Gray, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde (although that character didn’t appear until the final season and was in fact a bit of a disappointment since he didn’t go through any physical changes), just to name a few. Every time the show introduced a new element such as the appearances of witches, voodoo dolls, Vanessa Ives’ stint in the Victorian asylum, an old Indian who became a werewolf…I would pee a little in my pants. No, but you know what I mean. I would watch this show on my own because I can be trusted to keep my inner horror nerd from going nuts around other people.

For someone who rarely got emotional watching movies (except ones with dogs in it), I found myself getting a bit teary eyed watching the last episode. In order to make this show last just a little bit longer, I worked on a “Penny Dreadful” set after I’m done with my after hours. Late night, me alone with my dolls…seems apt, doesn’t it?

This set features Vanessa Ives portrayed by one of my favorite actresses Eva Green, Sir Malcolm Murray, Ethan Chandler, who is also a werewolf, The Creature, whom I just wanted to give him a hug because he’s so sad and lonely, the immortal Dorian Gray, Lily Frankenstein, and of course, Dr. Frankenstein.

Itty bitty Dr. Frankenstein has a teeny weeny syringe!

Twin Peaks Revisited

It’s been a long time since I’ve painted Twin Peaks so I jumped at the chance to do an update. I was given a choice to paint Laura Palmer as a corpse or as a prom queen. Ever since I received these tiara charms, I’ve been looking for an excuse to use them so I naturally was leaning toward the prom queen version…until the night before I was to tackle the project. A flash of inspiration hit me and I quickly went downstairs to the chest freezer and rummaged around until I found some puff pastry sheets. The plastic protecting the frozen puff pastries were perfect. They had precisely the color, the give, and the thinness to recreate a miniature body bag. My new dead Laura Palmer’s body bag would not be painted on, but rather, wrapped. Then I did more rummaging (not in the chest freezer, thank you very much) and unearthed the crepe hair I had purchased years ago on a whim and matted it until it looked like it was drudged from a swamp and viola! A new dead Laura Palmer!

There’s also a new addition to the cast, Shelly the waitress, along with Agent Cooper, Evil Bob, and of course, the Dancing Dwarf.

Because of this set, I got to do more rummaging (this time in the pantry) for the onion jam so I could use up the unprotected pastry sheets and made several batches of onion jam puff roll ups. The things I do for art.

Gold Coast Bakery 60th Year!

For the Gold Coast Bakery’s 60th anniversary, I was asked to create a set of dolls after their mascot, a baker. If you live on the Gold Coast, you might have spotted one of their trucks tooling ’round town, or pawed at their products at the supermarket.

It’s always a great deal of fun painting cartoon-like characters. And bread. I love painting bread, more than I love eating it!

Spirited Away

Believe it or not, my mother was the person to introduce me to all things Miyazaki. She came home from her errands one day and gave me a video tape from her Chinese video rental place.

“Here,” she said as she also attempted to shove a bao into my gullet, “watch this. You’ll like it.”

The video tape in question was “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” Although my mother and I are two very different people, she knows me like no others. She was using the word “binging” in the context of “cramming TV shows” before it was being applied to anything other than an eating disorder and had me watching the entire original Japanese version of “The Ring” miniseries (there were about 60 episodes or something insane like that) in one weekend, so naturally I immediately popped it into the VCR, knowing this woman gets me. Boy, she was right. I did enjoy the movie tremendously. The artistry, the details, the story. It brought a hardened New Yorker such as myself to tears. After that, every time she’s in Taiwan, she would hunt for the latest Miyazaki masterpiece before it was barely out of Japan and I was hooked for life.

Even though I try to stay away from painting dolls based on animation, I couldn’t turn down a chance to do one of my all time favorite Miyazaki films: “Spirited Away.”

This one features No Face, Boh the cranky baby, YuBaba and YuBird, Chihiro, and the Kashira (the trio of heads that bounce around).

When this project was proposed, I immediately dug around in my supply drawers and found something that would be the perfect representation of the three heads. It took some sawing and sanding to make them all fit. Most people believe I stand around all day painting dainty little things when in fact I have a Dremel at the ready, fully charged at all time for emergency adjustments, a belt sander downstairs, and a box of band aids nearby for any power tool-related injuries. Even though “traditional” nesting dolls sets aren’t quite as trying to make, I do enjoy these challenges now and then to break things up a bit!